Dear Future self,

The next time you run into PHP Fatal error: Call to undefined method DB_Error::query() and you are pretty sure all the correct libraries are installed , check if you can connect to the database with the username / password you have configured. Just as today you might have migrated to a new mysql server and forgotten to update the connection string.

thank you for your attention.

You know, normally I use this blog for posting thoughts primarily focused on technical aspects of DRBD, Linux, HA solutions, or (normally) a combination of all three. This one is an exception.

These past couple of days I had the pleasure of doing a DRBD/Linux-HA training with 6 Sales and Professional Services MySQLers. And like just about anyone I’ve met from MySQL up to this point, without exception each and every one of them was smart, professional, open-minded, and generally fun to be around. I greatly enjoyed my past two work days. If you reading this post happen to be one of those 6 guys, thank you very much.

And the nice part about the company I work for is that highly productive and fun days at work like these are the norm, rather than the exception.

…

MySQL Proxy 0.6.0 has been tagged and should hit the mirrors near you pretty soon.

In the last 3 month of development we added a lot more features to the proxy-core which should bring the proxy closer to your needs. As always the proxy is transparent to your application, no requirement for a special language, no special needs for a platform and all customizable for your needs.

The most powerful feature is Read/Write Splitting which allows you to scale a application which is unaware of replication automaticly cross several slaves without changes to your application. Instance Scale Out we say.

The Proxy also became a 1st class citizen in the MySQL world with …

59 - that is the number of statistics collected by mysqlnd. When I started writing this blog post, I hoped it would be easy going describing them. But it wasn’t. Some ten days ago, we’ve had 51 statistics and near zero tests for them. Now we have 59 statistics. And, in a certain way, every figure is a tuning screw in the hand of one who knows what they do.

I must confess, I grossly underestimated the time it takes to write only a few words about some of them. Here is a first batch of comments on some 20 figures. Already those some 20 figures should give you an idea how the mysqlnd statistics might help you with bottleneck analysis, monitoring. Or you use the statistics to identify scripts that select more rows than they consume, open more connections than needed, …

How to access client statistics with mysqlnd

Statistics are only available with mysqlnd. Statistics can be accessed using:

• Per process: …

In this modern Web-based world, I figure I should try and keep things, well, really, up-to-date as quickly as possible. For those of you not in Japan, I do hope the pictures of the UC-J interest (and tempt) you… The master set: MySQL Users Conference Japan (UC-J) 2007.

Some quick snippets follow. I’ve tagged them uc-j (flickr should treat it as “ucj”) as well as uc-j2007 (because, this may be the first, but it’s definitely not the last!).

Mats, Mr. Ruby

Big, big, crowd. Room holds 600. 1,200 registered. Standing room!

Jimmy, Mr. Carrier Grade Cluster

I haven’t actually written about my amazing Japan trip. Arrived late on Saturday night, spent the whole of Sunday doing tourist-y stuff, visited MySQL KK on Monday, had an amazing dinner later with lots of MySQLers, and today, Tuesday is the first day of the users conference. And boy was it fun!

Larry-san spoke Japanese in the keynote introduction, and boy was it amazing. I absolutely loved the honesty in Yukihiro “Mats” Matsumoto’s talk. It was even funnier that while he spoke Japanese, and people laughed at his jokes, it took a while for the simultaneous translators to catch up with English, and then we’d have delayed laughter :)

I gave my talk today, and was pretty pleased with the attendance. My 35 slides were delivered in a mere 50 minutes, and at parts I was …

There are two recent updates on the MySQL storage engine front worth looking into.  Paul McCullagh over at PrimeBase has updated their BLOB Streaming engine MyBS. (Ok, some people like the name, others don't.  I suggest going for something more serious sounding.)  The engine itself is pretty cool.  It'a not really a general purpose engine, but the idea is to be able to store BLOBS of any size and stream them directly into and out of the database.  Ideally, any engine could use the BLOB repository and streaming API. Paul got a good reaction at his MySQL Camp …

It’s now officical: Japanese translations of the Developer and Database Administrator certification exams will be available all over Japan as of September 25. As usual, the exams will be delivered through Pearson VUE.

We’re obviously pretty excited about this, and so are visitors to the MySQL Japan User’s Conference that is going on right now. Pearson VUE are here with two testing stations that have a few sample exam questions. Visitors have a lot of fun testing their own MySQL knowledge.

If you’re in or near Tokyo, you can …

Falcon engine is here! It seems that MySQL is pushing very hard to have its own transaction engine ever since Innodb was acquired by Oracle. MySQL should buy Innodb long time ago. Now they are paying for the price!

On the bright side, I do believe the developers at MySQL will do a good job and come out something better than Innodb :-)

In the next few weeks, I will do some benchmarks to how the baby falcon doing.

http://www.mysql.com/mysql60/

One of the cool capabilities that's part of our Enterprise subscription offering is MysQL Enterprise Monitor.  This week at our user conference in Japan we showed a preview of the forthcoming Japanese version.  I don't know what it says, …